Number 46 Ellerton Road, Kingston, has no preserved trees in its garden. I know this because I've just zoomed in on the address at random from a website set up by the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames.
The web service, called ISIS (you can find it on www.kingston.gov.uk ), contains information on every address in the borough, whether it's a house, a shopping centre or a public toilet. Apart from tree preservation orders, each has a planning history dating back to 1947 and a building history from the 1880s. You can look at aerial photos, or check the distance to the nearest recycling bins or school. And it's all free.
Council officers like ISIS because they have to spend less time handling phone inquiries. So do residents: ISIS handles around 100 "user sessions" a day. One user commented: "No offence, but it's the last thing you'd expect to find on a council website."
ISIS is just one of many local services which demonstrate that, when it comes to e-government, councils are capable of innovative thinking. This is just as well, because the main burden of meeting the 2005 target for all public services to be online will fall on the UK's 465 local authorities.
It's a tall order. Local authorities face their own special obstacles on top of those faced by Whitehall and other agencies. Let's look at those difficulties:
Range of services
Central government agencies do only a handful of things - licensing drivers and vehicles, for example. Local authorities do at least 100, from running cemeteries to paying housing benefit to clearing wasps' nests. This creates big IT problems: metropolitan authorities such as Birmingham City have dozens of IT systems that were never designed to share information.
Legal requirements
Everything that a local authority does is governed by laws specifying what it must and must not do. At present, for example, councils can't send out tax bills by email because by law they have to accompany bills with information about where the tax is being spent, and whether it's gone up since last year.
The government has just announced plans to change this law, to allow councils to get into e-billing. It is also considering changes to another, more controversial law, covering the sharing of personal data between departments.
Today, on top of the normal provisions of the Data Protection Act, a council department that collects data for one purpose has no legal power to use it for another - even if the individual concerned gives consent. The 1992 Local Government Finance Act specifically forbids the sharing of data in council tax systems, which in most authorities are the most up to date.
This means that authorities setting up council-wide change-of-address notification and other "one-stop" services are usually breaking the law. It's one of the issues that the Downing Street Performance and Innovation Unit proposes tackling in its report Privacy and Data-Sharing, published last April. But it will take time.
Financial
Local authorities are still the poor relations in the e-government bonanza. Of the pounds 1 billion in new money allocated for UK Online between 2001 and 2004, local authorities received only pounds 350m. Their e-government plans, as set out in documents called Implementing Elecronic Government statements, add up to pounds 2.5bn. Although the chancellor's latest spending review has promised another pounds 511m, it is clear that councils which want to realise their e-visions will have to find money elsewhere - usually by cutting services.
Local government
A final problem has its roots in the philosophy of local government itself. It's clearly absurd for hundreds of authorities, all running more or less the same services, each to develop their own e-government systems. Central government (and IT companies, which frequently come to grief in local government) are trying to persuade councils to form consortia or buy systems developed for their neighbours.
This does not go down well in council chambers: the whole point of Upper Snodsbury Borough Council is to run things differently from Lower Snodsbury Borough Council. In their obsession with e-government, Whitehall, and the IT industry, would do well not to tread too heavily on what little remains of local democracy.
